Using an old Freenas Data Disk

[gearhead]

I had couple of old disks in my Freenas system that I replaced. I used Parted Magic to delete the two partition on each disk. I put one in a computer and booted the computer. Bios provided the following message "This is a FreeNAS data disk ad can not boot system. System halted." My question is how does bios knows that this was a FreeNAS disk? I thought by deleting the partitions all information is gone! TIA

 

[RickH]

I had couple of old disks in my Freenas system that I replaced. I used Parted Magic to delete the two partition on each disk. I put one in a computer and booted the computer. Bios provided the following message "This is a FreeNAS data disk ad can not boot system. System halted." My question is how does bios knows that this was a FreeNAS disk? I thought by deleting the partitions all information is gone! TIA

ZFS actually writes some metadata on the first few sectors and the LAST few sectors of the drive - blowing out the partitions doesn't always overwrite this data and can cause the issue you're seeing.

This thread walks through a process to remove this metadata so the disk can be used again:

"Operation not permitted" when trying to wipe disks

tl;dr: How can I wipe a disk? I'm running FreeNAS 11.1-u5, I imported the config from another FreeNAS install that was attached to another volume so as to get all of the previously configured users and groups and I'm trying to setup a new mirrored ZVOL with two 1TB disks that I had previously...

www.ixsystems.com

 

[gearhead]

thank you